December 31, 2012

I'm rather saddened and wholly perplexed, but not at all annoyed, by some readers' reactions to my recent criticisms of the Obama administration's inept or misguided navigation of the fiscal cliff. Inept or misguided happens to be my characterization of President Obama's actions to date because inept or misguided is what I believe his actions have been.

This site is called "p m carpenter's commentary" for the immensely unoriginal reason that I, P.M. Carpenter, hold forth with my commentary here. I am not a hack, I am not a flack, I am not any kind of hired gun for anyone. I express my opinions as genuinely and honestly as I possibly can. And I should think all readers would far prefer honest commentary from me rather than my pandering to what I know would be the easier, more popular route of uninterrupted, pro-Obama flackdom.

Nonetheless some readers, it turns out, don't want honesty at all. They want soothing, comforting reinforcements of whatever it is they happen to believe, which of course they have every right to believe. They should, however, at the very least lighten the hell up, for I have the selfsame right.

What's tremendously ironic about all this is that criticisms of the Obama administration, especially at this decisive juncture, are perhaps the most valuable assets the administration could acquire. Only the deliberate absence of honest assessments of wrong paths taken, or of those under consideration, would represent a dereliction of civic or journalistic duty. And I respect the Obama administration far too much to stay quiet or to aid and abet what I regard as its potentially self-destructive paths.

Yesterday, Ezra Klein cited a Marco Rubio tweet--"Report that #GOP insisting on changes to social security as part of #fiscalcliff false. BTW those changes are supported by @barackobama"--which Klein correctly identified as splendid evidence of Republicans' breathtaking hypocrisy and gutless stance and neverending political quandary. He summarized their plight with no small amount of sarcasm:

Today’s Republican Party thinks the key problem America faces is out-of-control entitlement spending. But cutting entitlement spending is unpopular and the GOP’s coalition relies heavily on seniors. And so they don’t want to propose entitlement cuts. If possible, they’d even like to attack President Obama for proposing entitlement cuts. But they also want to see entitlements cut and will refuse to solve the fiscal cliff or raise the debt ceiling unless there are entitlement cuts.

All true, and perfectly logical, as well as perfectly lethal--if you're a Republican. Which makes the fourth sentence--sort of dropped in by Klein without further comment--so indescribably baffling: "If possible, they’d even like to attack President Obama for proposing entitlement cuts." But there is no "if possible," there's only whenever, since President Obama quite recently did just that: he converted the merely possible into the tantalizingly embraceable for wannabe, safety-net-slashing Republicans.

Some observers have got themselves hung up on the merits (or demerits) of a "chained CPI," which itself is an altogether negligible skirmish within the broader strategic context. The unsurrenderable issue at stake is that of offering for negotiation the nation's most successful social-insurance program in the midst of fiscal talks which inherently have nothing to do with the insurance program and in turn the insurance program has nothing to do with our fiscal troubles at the heart of the talks. Which is to say, to dangle an umbelliferous irrelevancy such as a chained CPI--whatever its stand-alone merits--isn't a sign of presidential "reasonableness": it's a flashing, iridescent, explosive sign of negotiable cowardice.

As is moving $200,000 in the other guys' direction on a $250,000 tax deal (i.e., a move of nearly 100 percent), or marooning two top cabinet nominations.

Those other guys? They've smelled the fear, whose profoundly inexcusable element is its utterly inappropriate timing. With every passing day, a second-term presidency loses irreplaceable political capital. And yet the Obama administration just squandered a boatload of it, right out of the gate.

The upside? It's still early. There's plenty of time to alter course. And grow a couple.

It's simply not credible for a president to threaten that "if, from this point on, Republicans think they can ... [fill in the blank] ... then they've got another thing coming"--as that president is capitulating at this point.

Obama's political office has lost touch. That news conference wasn't just a bad idea. It was an embarrassingly bad idea. The president pre-conceded what two months ago were unthinkable concessions, and remain utterly unnecessary ones. Now, notwithstanding Congress's actions on the Senate "deal," Obama is permanently lathered in its malodorous worst.

The administration seems discombobulated. I know the president and his people are tired, the campaign was a long one, and the issues confronting them are daunting. But this--today, and recent days--is perhaps the most maladroit launch to a second term in presidential history. It's so bad, it's embarrassing.

It should be added that Congress has no exclusive rights to the Rabbit Hole. Here's some "objective" reporting, for instance, from Politico:

Going over the cliff is not how Americans want to start 2013: with hefty new tax hikes and spending cuts that could send the stock market plummeting, slash defense spending and interrupt an economic recovery that was just beginning to spark....

The McConnell-Biden talks look like they could avert this potential disaster.

Reality: Both the "hefty new tax hikes and spending cuts" could be deferred for days or weeks, until, that is, a clean tax bill passes (which, with proper presidential agitation and public pressure applied, it would); defense spending, which, even in relative peacetime, is twice what it was only a few years ago, needs to be "slashed"; and at any rate the stock market's plummet and recovery's interruption have yet to meet the second monstrous round of madness which comes their way--Republicans' debt-ceiling apocalypse.

And what of the bloodiest casualty of a cliff deal as presently outlined by McConnell-Biden; that of Democrats stiffing an electorate which just strengthened the former's hand by granting it a decisive victory at the polls? Is the nation's confidence in its elected representatives really that negotiable? That expendable? That worthless?

I'm with the Tea Partiers. Screw this deal. For that matter, and in general, to hell with the Dems, too. I'll take my disorienting anarchy straight, no chaser--and with no Democratic imprimatur.

Senate Democrats have so far agreed to redefine middle-class families as those earning $449,999 or less, while Republicans have counter-preposterous'd that American affluence commences only in considerable excess of a half-million a year.

(This "breaking news" just in, from Politico: McConnell now agrees with Democrats' preposterousness, having recognized that there's little to no difference between the ridiculous and the sublimely ridiculous.)

Meanwhile, a bit of emphasis added:

Democrats acknowledge they will not be able to include stimulus funding for transportation and infrastructure projects. Republicans say Democrats have dropped their demand to raise the debt ceiling.

December 30, 2012

Mitch McConnell just appeared on the Senate floor to re-announce his undying commitment to reasonable compromise. Harry Reid, immediately afterward, praised his friend and colleague as a man of good faith. (How both can spew such crap with a straight face remains beyond me, but that's another story.)

And, surprise, there is no Senate deal, because, as CNN first reported, McConnell demanded that President Obama's earlier offer of a chained CPI be replugged into a compromise, and Democrats have balked.

Thus "reasonableness" comes back to bite the Democratic side in the ass. You don't ever offer a concession you're not prepared to live with, or one whose acceptability to your own party is uncertain, as both Speaker Boehner and President Obama have now done. What's more, given an ironclad and invulnerable fallback position--the cliff itself--any proposed concessions were sure to be self-destructive to the Dems, for Republicans could then righteously drag those concessions into the new year's negotiations on any middle-class tax-cut legislation, which, no doubt, they'll now do.

This--Obama's proffered S.S. concession--was a self-inflicted wound, and yet more evidence that one should never attempt compromise with faithless, opportunistic gangsters.

***

Today's developments don't just border on the absurd, they're steeped in it. Now John McCain says "We need to take CPI off the table. That is not part of the negotiations because we can't win an argument that has Social Security for seniors versus taxes for the rich so we need to take it off the table," and McConnell agrees.

A chained CPI, however, is now fair game in all other negotiations on virtually any issue. Yet another whack at safety nets has been legitimized--always a prime GOP objective. Hence the fundamental argument remains unaffected: Don't ever attempt compromise with these animals.

It is perhaps a karmic sign or celestial "told you so" or merely a hellish reality that the Number One reason Speaker Boehner is headed for reelection next week is that House Republicans have screwed themselves nearly as much as they've screwed America. Said one, "There’s no 'better plan' to get the House GOP out of this mess, i.e., 'If I were speaker, I would do "X" as an alternative.'"

I've yet to watch President Obama's appearance on "Meet the Press," but according to a just-in news alert he reissued on the program his understatement that Republicans "have had trouble saying yes"--a manifestation of borderline personality disorder for whose intervention the president knows that he, too, should thank either heaven or hell. Because in fiscal-cliff negotiations he moved on revenue, moved on spending, moved on stimulus, moved on a debt-ceiling prohibition and moved on entitlements. If Republicans had simply had the good sense to exploit these gratuitous appeasements, the president would have had nothing but hell to pay with his base.

History will marvel for centuries that Republicans could have ever been so inexpressibly stupid, and Obama, so lucky.

December 29, 2012

If you want Washington to come together, you need to make it painful for those who are breaking it apart. Telling both sides to come together when it’s predominantly one side breaking the negotiations apart actually makes it easier on those who’re refusing to compromise.

Implicit in Klein's sizable paradox is also its vast expansion. Many of us who have regularly urged compromise as the proper grease of government's machinery now find ourselves the most tactically as well as philosophically uncompromising faction. Republicans' deliberate gridlock, maliciously imposed, has reached such intolerable heights that by now the only serviceable response is the selfsame intransigence, squared.

Time and again we have been to Munich, time and again we have cautiously accepted the ideological militants' good faith, and time and again we have been betrayed. Each compromise--each appeasement--has been but a minor, temporary triumph in the opposition's march to total victory--which they mean to either achieve, or destroy us in the attempt. They intend, as Lincoln characterized his contemporaneous version of these cryptofascistic wretches, to "rule or ruin in all events."

As only a delicious paradox might have it, these non-compromisers will now desperately seek some oxygen-permitting compromise, while yesterday's virtuous compromisers should simply slam the door on any compromise whatsoever. For we'll never breathe easily again, until we asphyxiate this threat.

December 28, 2012

Here, from Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, is the latest marker of rising, squalid disingenuity in the GOP's congressional cesspool:

You know, they're sitting around down at the White House like it was a Harvard Law Review meeting, just to show who's the smartest person in the room. We don't need the smartest person in the room. We need someone to get up and say, "OK, America, we need to deal with revenues; that's the bad news; and we also need to deal with the Medicare fiscal cliff, or you're not going to get your medical bills paid."

Catch that? Suddenly it's the Medicare fiscal cliff, a slight precipice which ObamaCare in fact forestalled by a few more years--an effort vigorously opposed, of course, by Republicans.

I don't know how they do it, but they really do manage to always find ways to new lows, or, as the intro has it, to new high-squalidness markers.

One cannot negotiate with such animals. One mustn't even try. One simply rehearses Corleone's line: "Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing."

It's true. Politico has gone ostentatiously wonkbatty on us, explaining in John Nash's beautifully mindful manner that Washington's top players are self-interestedly entrenched because entrenchment happens to serve their self-interests.

Got it?

If so, you're either Nobel Prize material or you've an even brighter future at Politico's Wonkbat Department.

While it's fun to wargame potential coalitions between House Democrats and their yet-pathologized Republican counterparts, eventually reality intervenes and insists on re-terrorizing us. This, for example, from Cook Political Report, via Politico:

[J]ust six Republicans--around 3 percent of the House GOP Conference--will occupy districts whose overall voter makeup favors Democrats. That figure is down from 22 Republicans that resided in such Democrat-friendly districts in 2012.

Perhaps the most relentless reality-distorter in our wargaming amusements is the varying headcount of the Tea Party and Tea Party-aligned caucus within the 113th Congress's House Republican conference. Observers routinely cite anywhere from 50 to 80 of these yokels--they'll be the problem, we hear; they'll be the ones so disagreeably haunting all of John Boehner's moderate dreams--yet the actual number is closer to 227 (233 minus the above six). The reason for such realistic yokel-inflation is simple: "Establishment" Republicans who fear Tea Party primary challengers will vote as de facto Tea Partiers.

And that, further, is why some formal schism--either an institutional split between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, or the Tea Party-cum-GOP versus an inchoate Conservative Party--is essential to conservatism's survival. As long as congressional Republicans at large are subject to the narrow, fanatically pseudoconservative whims of a Tea Party primary base, they cannot vote as traditional Republicans might and thus the party will, in time, Cheshire-like, swallow itself whole.

December 27, 2012

This afternoon I'm escorting 13- and 14-year-old girls to a post-Christmas, present-madness shopping mall. For defensive mental health I'll be armed with a copy of the Bard's Merry Wives, which, assuming an available bench, should be sufficient. Otherwise, because my religious faith is infinitely shaky, it wouldn't hurt if you were to say a little prayer for me, since today I'm also infinitely outmatched.

Hey, let's remember that Kennedy/Sorensen's Profiles in Courage is a rather thin volume for a good, and self-evident, reason.

In fact so good and self-evident is the truth of political self-preservation that I can't help but think that Harry Reid was compelled to suppress a chuckle when he charged this morning that the House is "being run" by the "dictatorship" of the boehnerariat. Reid, reports the Hill, said the speaker "cares more about his speakership than protecting middle-class Americans from tax hikes."

Imagine that.

Of course one could argue--and this, too, I'm sure Reid understands--that there's actually an element of subtle virtue in Boehner's dictatorship. The speaker probably believes--or rather knows--that a passed bill now would only doom his renewed speakership later; thereupon the odds of a real Neanderthal taking charge would increase exponentially; and then absolutely nothing but tortured tea-party cretinism would ever make it out of the House.

Question: What fundamental differences inhere in the following assertions?

a. I willingly admit that I base my worldview on Mein Kampf, which I believe is true. Opinion changes, but truth doesn’t.b. I willingly admit that I base my worldview on The Collected Ravings of Newt Gingrich, which I believe is true. Opinion changes, but truth doesn’t.c. I willingly admit that I base my worldview on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which I believe is true. Opinion changes, but truth doesn’t.d. I willingly admit that I base my worldview on the Bible, which I believe is true. Opinion changes, but truth doesn’t.

Answer: Except for the superficial differences in the works' titles--and, OK, "b" is fictitious--the assertions are essentially identical. All are propagandistically oriented in a logically fallacious seduction--I believe something to be true, and Truth doesn't change, therefore my belief is a righteous one.

Nonetheless there's an enormous difference in practice. Expressed beliefs in the legend of King Arthur, or in the ravings of a repeatedly disgraced American pipsqueak, or in the rambling incoherence of a bloodthirsty megalomaniac are generally left unembraced by others as genuine expressions of a genuine and universal Truth. Yet if some self-styled holy man, say, a Rick Warren, appears on cable television and utters "d" in its precise formulation, his internal piety is conceded by many, if not the Truth itself.

Why? No particular reason (or Reason), other than that lots of viewers believe it, their parents most likely believed it, whose parents believed it, whose parents believed it, and so on. And there you have it--the principal, traditionalist case for conservatism, both religious and political: an unthinking, logically fallacious fealty to Beliefs in Truths as revealed by Beliefs.

Religious conservatism in Western civilization is, rather rapidly, being escorted away for safe keeping chiefly in the columns of Ross Douthat. As for political conservatism's economic-"theory" traditionalism, the combined imbecilities of Europe's austerity and America's tea partyism are finally revealing the immense logical chasms between belief and truth.

December 26, 2012

The U.S. government will hit the $16.4 trillion federal debt limit on Monday and turn to "extraordinary measures" to continue borrowing, the Treasury Department said Wednesday, beginning a countdown until Congress either passes legislation to allow for more borrowing or the government defaults on its debt.

So once again, and sooner than thought, we encounter those five most terrifying words in the English language: "Beginning a countdown until Congress ..."

The degree to which the debt ceiling's somewhat premature collapse complicates the government's already deeply destructive, gratuitous gridlock is immeasurable. For years, contemporary Republicans have distinguished themselves as America's most destabilizing force since the 1850s' Southern Democrats--and now the horrible power of the GOP's threatened nihilism is effectively doubled.

As are the prospects of total war, which, like most wars, is being provoked by a bottomless fatuity. The post-apocalypse upside, assuming Democrats entrench? (And I do mean unwaveringly.) We won't have this Republican Party to kick around anymore, for it will have made history of itself.

I enjoyed this observation from Barney Frank, speaking to Politico in a stage-left-exit interview:

I know reporters [and we assume commentators] who are the most hypersensitive people in the world. It really does strike me that people who make a living by writing rude things about other people get so upset if you suggest any criticism of them.

I strive to avoid such craven behavior. If you've criticism, bring it on. I'm no masochist, but I can cheerfully withstand intelligent slams; to me, the least pardonable intellectual sin is to hold one's tongue for fear of offending any of the many, mindless Booster Clubs out there--among which, this site is not one.

As for Frank's quip about folks who thrive on "writing rude things about other people"--in my folksy case, "other people" generally being right-wing nincompoops, but I repeat myself--I'm reminded of Goethe's Faust, which opens with this brief exchange:

The Lord:

Can you not speak but to abuse?Do you come only to accuse?Does nothing on earth seem right to you?

Mephistopheles:

No, Lord. I find it still a rather sorry sight.Man moves me to compassion, so wretched is his plight.I have no wish to cause him further woe.

I'm with Mr. M. on this one--although, Lord help me, I do so cherish all heaps of woe on the radical right.

Go ahead, read it. But you'll likely feel compelled to read it again, and yet again, for Norman Ornstein's "Huntsman for speaker!" op-ed not only resists comprehension, it batters and bloodies it.

They've driven poor Ornstein mad, these dastardly Republicans--so mad, he's reduced to proposing a remedial "action" that is "out-of-the-box," as he puts it, which means he's surrendered all hope and originality to conventionally styled desperation.

The action? "The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House," observes Ornstein, thus the House should "find someone from outside ... to transcend the differences and alter the dysfunctional dynamic we are all enduring."

But that's the thing. The speaker isn't the problem. The problem is a prodigiously dysfunctional House majority, from whose internal rot another squalid speakership shall arise.

I can just barely envision one possible but improbable escape: Boehner is reelected; he somehow scraps the Hastert Rule (which requires GOP unity on floor votes); and then he cobbles together a functional coalition of the House's two minorities--Democrats and that surviving breed of despairingly sane Republicans, before they vanish altogether.

December 24, 2012

Just as occurred with Rice, the U.N. ambassador whose prospective nomination as secretary of State ... flamed out in the face of widespread criticism of her, President Obama appears to be rethinking his choice for Defense secretary.

Generals, it is commonly observed, always fight, or prepare to fight, the last war--a martial failing that is seemingly, regrettably underway in the White House. Doubtless Obama's political generals are tired. They've been through a long and bloody campaign--grueling hours and dozens of crucial decisions each day, all with decency's future hanging in the balance. It's an exhausting, brain-numbing burden; indeed it's enough to make a political strategist survey the next war's pressing enormities and think: How about we just do what we successfully did last time?

Because "last time" was brilliant. Last time worked. Last time entailed a daring, pragmatic long-game that though irritating as hell to the left's anxious idealists was in reality the best possible strategy to achieve incremental victories, demonstrate patient leadership and a compromising spirit to swing voters, and thus win reelection. But that was then, and then is not now. Unlike early 2009, now means another four presidential years whose presiding influence and power will endure for only about two.

The White House can no longer afford to play the long game, because the game is now politically and Constitutionally shortened--the evisceration of lame duckism looms and reelection is removed from the governing equation. Hence any WH notion that political capital preserved today on, say, cabinet nominations, won't suffer immense devaluation tomorrow on, say, the debt-ceiling issue, is catastrophically, anachronistically misguided.

I've never made any secret of my deep admiration for the Obama administration; in fact I have frequently compared it to Lincoln's and declared it the progressive-conservative successor to FDR's. And if I didn't admire it and wish it every possible success, I'd keep my critical mouth shut and thereby do it the greatest possible disservice.

If one sees a valued friend going down the wrong road, one intervenes bearing the truest gift of friendship: corrective advice.